The Summary Report overview

This article helps you understand the summary report information.

Gayathri Rajendiran avatar
Written by Gayathri Rajendiran
Updated over a week ago

A Summary Report is the best way to unpack the success and progress of your projects. This report is used to give you key insights into "how" your project is going and looks at key statistics to help you evaluate your consultation.

Use this article to learn about the types of information you can expect to find on the Project Reports screen. 

Selected Projects

You can look at Reporting for your site as a whole, or make a specific selection looking at single projects or a range of projects over a certain time period.

Simply select the project/s and time period from the project selector to filter your results.

All data will be displayed according to the parameters you set here.

Note: 1. The preset time frames (All time, Last 30 days, Last 7 days) only show data and submissions until the previous day at 11.59 pm. In order to show the most up-to-date data please use a custom time range ending today.

2. All time will show data from the site launch data till yesterday's date. To view any activity before the site was launched, please choose the custom date range option

Visitor Summary

Once you have selected your projects you will notice the information on the project screen updates to give you insights about your selected project. 

In the first section, you will see a Visitors Summary including highlight statistics for your consultation.

Use these stats to understand how successful your project has been in terms of reach and awareness and also database growth.

You can also use the graphs to interrogate your data over the time period and toggle on and off different data including page views, visitors, visits, and new registrations.

Note : Anonymous visits to the site before launch are tracked and can be viewed by selecting the custom date range option.

Visitors vs Visits Explained

When an anonymous visitor comes to your site for the very first time, we drop a cookie into their browser. Cookies allow us to determine if that particular browser has been used to visit your site before.

With every visit that occurs to the site, we begin tracking that particular visitor by creating what is called a 'session'. Each session has a unique ID and lasts until 30 minutes of inactivity are observed. We figure that by then they have left your site and are doing something else. Within 30 minutes, they could visit the site multiple times. If that happens, the count towards your visits will only receive a +1 from the initial visit. If they come back later and 30 minutes have passed, we will count that as another +1 for your visits while the visitor number only received a +1 overall.

This means that in theory, your amount of visits will ALWAYS be higher than your amount of visitors. It also means that the same person can contribute multiple counts to your visit’s number over the course of a day/week/month. If someone visits your site in the morning, at lunch, and again in the afternoon in the same browser, they contribute +1 count to the visitor number and +3 to the visits. This happens because we start a new session for each visit with at least 30 minutes in-between.

This is the rule, but as always there are quite a few exceptions. For more information on the same, you can refer to the article.

Sources of Traffic

The next section shows you an overview of traffic sources for your selected projects. Use this section in the same way as the visitor summary data to toggle on and off your different data sources.

To learn more about traffics sources read our dedicated help article on Understanding Traffic Sources.

Participant Summary

The Participant Summary allows you to look at a range of selected projects and compare the Aware, Informed and Engaged metrics between them.

Simply scroll through the three metrics on the left-hand column to reveal how each of your participants interacted with your projects. You can see these actions in the middle column.

The Top Projects on the right show you how effective your projects have been. As a rule of thumb: The higher the % of Informed or Engaged participants within a project the higher your conversion rate has been and the more successful your project can be considered. Of course there are exceptions to this rule.

For example, you might run a project that only aims to inform people and the actual engagement component is secondary. Hence, you wouldn't expect a high rate of engagement for that project.

Over time you should develop your own benchmarks and compare conversion rates with each other. It is usually better to compare relative numbers than absolute numbers.

You should also look at this report periodically to keep track of which of your projects are standing out.

Engagement Tools Summary

Finally, the Engagement Tools Summary section will give you more detail into types of engagement activities and information you have presented for your selected projects.

The tool summary will show you at a glance where your engagement has occurred. There is lots to discover here and we invite you to 'View Full Report' in your own time. You will be able to drill down and really dissect all comments and submissions you have received.

Note: The total count of tools when checked for any date range will be the current(as on date) tool count as the report gets updated with current data. This is because reporting primarily captures only Participant submission and not admin activity.

Information Widget Summary

The Information Widget Summary shows you how people became Informed and it tells you what content was particularly prominent and popular.

If you find that one of your documents has not been downloaded as much as you wish, maybe it's time to place it more prominently and link to it.

Be careful not to read too much into some of this data, however. For example, a photo can be viewed without the participant clicking on it. The same is true for Key Dates. 

Documents on the other hand can only be accessed by clicking on it which makes that a very strong number. However, note that we do not collect the IP addresses, hence we cannot be sure if a download was made more than once by a single participant.

Download Report

All of what you see below can be downloaded in your preferred format. You can create a summarizing report for all your projects or detailed project reports, containing details about everything, for up to 5 projects at the same time. The report you create will depend on your selection of projects and time. To obtain a summarizing report for the entire site since launch, select all projects and 'All-time' as your time frame.

Note: The number of characters that can be displayed in the below section is 30. Anything more than that will be truncated.

If you want a second pair of eyes looking at your data or if you have any questions, get in touch with us. We are looking forward to talking through your numbers and insights with you.

Contact our support team if you need any further assistance via chat or email support@engagementhq.com

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